The answer, of course, depends on objectives. Twitter as Market Intelligence - Find Out What People Are Saying About Your Company and Products At a minimum, you should monitor the social networks, including Twitter, to see what's being said about your company and your product. Whether or not you choose to actively participate, most companies pay for the kind of market research that Twitter can provide for free. The example on the right shows tweets produced on a search for a product, "Bell 206B." Many companies do surveys, focus groups and expensive customer outreach programs and don't get the kind of honest, off-the-cuff feedback from real clients and potential clients about what they like about a product, what they dislike about a product, who is buying and selling it, and how much used versions are selling for. I search for company names and product names for each of my clients and provide reports and alerts. Monitoring needs differ for each client - some want to know if their company name or products are being mentioned, others would like to know if competitors (or competitors' products) are being mentioned. Some want to know about a product class like "helicopters" or "ramp safety equipment" while others are more specific and want to be notified of mentions of specific brand names and models.

Twitter as a News Feed - Publish information about your company and products Publishing information about your company and products can be very effective with Twitter. Including a reference and a link to an article will reach a large audience, and potentially be passed along as other people "re-tweet," or copy your tweet to their own Twitter feed. If you're going to the effort of publishing articles, news releases, blog entries or other materials, you can maximize your investment in those materials by including Twitter in your publishing and distribution campaign. Twitter attracts attracted nearly 14 million visitors in the US alone (Nielsen Online, March ’08). That number is undoubtedly growing. Some of these visitors are "passive," in the sense that they do a lot of reading but don't publish any messages themselves. This "passive audience" is still very powerful. Twitter users subscribe to the "feeds" or lists of tweets of people with similar interests. People search for tweets about topics of interest to them and subscribe to the future posts of people that talk about these subjects. This makes Twitter unique. On Facebook, people connect with people they know, while on Twitter, people may subscribe to my feed without knowing anything about me other than the topics I publish information about (or "tweet" about, to use the Twitter vernacular!)

conversationtwitter — A conversation on Twitter

Twitter as a Conversation We've been able to engage in conversations with each other via instant messaging, so what's the value of Twitter? On Twitter, the conversation becomes public, and may engage the interest of other people beyond the original participants in the conversation. (This could also be a bad thing, so it's important to remember that you're interacting in a public space!) Even more powerful than publishing is engaging directly with people on Twitter. The conversation at right has three active participants, but could be viewed by the "followers" of any of those three participants. People always want to know what other people are talking about, so this expands the conversation beyond the people doing the talking to a potentially large number of "eavesdroppers" or passive participants who may become interested enough to find out more about the product or event, ultimately leading to a purchase. More participants are a marketers' dream, but could be a legal department's nightmare. So it's important to be sure that the members of your staff that participate in Twitter have a good grasp on the company's public objectives and a good set of guidelines to determine the right course of action. They also need to be comfortable escalating conversations to the right level of management when necessary. Frankly, I spent a long time "on the fence" about Twitter. I saw its potential as limited and its topics as mundane. (And frankly, it's used for the mundane by a lot of people!) But to extend that argument, I haven't decided that the telephone is not a legitimate business tool because of the vast number of mundane conversations every day on the phone. So, I apply the same logic to Twitter as a medium and a marketing tool. It's an excellent medium if you recognize its limitations. Whatever you do or don't do with Twitter, you should know that an enormous conversation is going on right now. It is very likely that your company or your products are being talked about. It's also very likely that your competitors are using Twitter, or developing plans to use it. It is very important to approach it thoughtfully.

From Advertising Age - Brands on Twitter: 76% of Accounts Are Infrequent Users The take-away: Most companies fail to realize Twitter's full potential as a market engagement platform. While 73% of Fortune 100 companies registered a total of 540 Twitter accounts, effectiveness based on level of activity, interaction and engagement were off the mark. Brand-squatted accounts, as reported last week in Ad Age, remains an issue for many companies. For those that are on board, many more are largely tepid accounts with limited activity and interactivity (76% of accounts tweet infrequently). Even more telling is how companies apply currently traditional marketing practices to this new media channel, including:

Twitter as a newsfeed: 26%

Twitter as brand-builder: 24%

Twitter as direct marketer/sales channel: 16%

Twitter as thought-leadership channel: 11%

Twitter as customer-service channel: 9%

Source: http://adage.com/digitalnext/article?article_id=140566

Next Steps It's important for every company to determine their strategy with social media, which does not necessarily mean to wholeheartedly embrace Twitter and start tweeting tomorrow. This public space is not a good venue for trial and error! You've invested much in your company's brand and your products' reputations. A free consultation is a good place to start. Let me know your objectives and I'll give you some actionable ideas of how you can set up your guidelines, add value to your current marketing efforts, or begin a new campaign using Twitter and other social media. ABCI designs custom social media campaigns for our clients, and we offer free consultations! Let us show you what we've done for other clients who sell aviation products and services, and give you some great suggestions with no obligation. Call 702-987-1679 or email Paula.Williams@AviationBusinessConsultants.com today. .